Sunday, December 28, 2008

New Vintage Type or Organizing and Editing Your Photos with Picasa

New Vintage Type: Classic Fonts for the Digital Age

Author: Steven Heller

Retro is the new modern. And nowhere is that fact more evident than in typography, which today uses vintage type in ads, book and magazine design, movies, and everywhere words convey meaning. Viewers may not even realize that the type itself conveys mood, information, and a sense of style, but graphic designers know the power of vintage type. Now the world’s foremost historian of graphic design presents New Vintage Type, a remarkable rethinking and rediscovery of old and classic typefaces for today’s modern needs. Hundreds of amazing, astounding, and obscure examples from around the world are gathered here, organized into five historically and stylistically grouped sections: the Victorian Age, the Woodtype Era, Art Deco Style, Modern Movement, and the Eccentric Movement. With hundreds of lively and one-of-a-kind examples, plus informed, intriguing text, New Vintage Type is the graphic designer’s guide to choosing and using vintage type for maximum impact.

If you're looking for an easy way to find photos on your PC, make a few editing fixes, and then share your images with others, look no further. Picasa, available as a free download from Google.com, makes it easy to instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures in seconds and sorts them into albums. From there, you can apply basic edits to your photos, burn them to CD, post them on your blog, or email them to friends. In this colorful, compact guide, author Steve Schwartz starts at the beginning, walking readers through the Picasa interface and showing readers how to set preferences. From there, he launches into the heart of this book, offering project-based instruction for organizing, viewing, and editing your photos, and then shows you how to use Picasa's built-in tools to print, email, or order professional prints of your images. In addition, readers will learn how to share their photos instantly with Hello, Picasa's free instant messaging software. Throughout the book, full-page, full-color screen shots and simple, step-by-step instructions lead readers through several projects, such as saving an image to the Windows desktop, creating a screensaver, making movies, generating photo-based Web pages, running a slideshow, and creating posters, collages, and contact sheets.